The Useless Tree

Confucian Innovation

An interesting profile in today's NYT of John Kao, a renaissance man of sorts who now focuses his thinking and working of issues of innovation and entrepreneurship.  One thing that caught my eye was how moving between two cultures provided him with skills that would be relevant for his later professional life:

Dr. Kao, who is 57, was born in Chicago to parents who came from China for graduate study at Northwestern. Growing up in Garden City, N.Y., “I’d wake up in a Confucian house and go to an American elementary school and play baseball and go back to the Chinese house,” he recalled. “I had to figure out how to balance two very different cultural references.”    

Whatever Confucian influence there was seemed to cultivate his creativity.  That doesn't surprise me, though it does push against a common critique of Confucianism as a conservative mind set that discourages change and innovation.   Indeed, Confucius himself seems to say as much when he describes his sense of himself:

The Master said: "Transmitting insight, but never creating insight, standing by my words and devoted to the ancients: perhaps I'm a little like that old sage, P'eng. (7.1)    

      Of course, he was creating insight, many sorts of insights.  Perhaps the most significant was his insistence that political leadership should be determined not by hereditary claim but by moral accomplishment. 

      Another thing I noticed about Mr. Kao was this:

“What I had learned about behavior and the cognitive realm was incredibly relevant,” he said. Before long he had written dozens of the kinds of case studies that are the basis of the school’s teaching and had organized a course on entrepreneurship, creativity and organizations.

Many of his cases were about failures — individuals under pressure, partnerships unraveling, learning through trial and error and so on. Today, Dr. Kao says failure’s relative lack of stigma is “a unique aspect of U.S. culture” that does not exist even in countries like Singapore or Finland, both clients and both, he said, “relatively hip.”

“There’s a saying in Silicon Valley,” he said. “If you haven’t gone bankrupt a couple of times you are not trying hard enough. It’s part of our national advantage.”

     The emphasis on failure brought Mencius immediately to mind:

We change only when we make mistakes.  We realize what to do only when we work through worry and confusion.  And we gain people's trust and understanding only when our inner thoughts are revealed clearly in our faces and words.  When it has no lawful families or wise officials within and no enemy threats without, a nation will surely come to ruin.  Then its people will understand that through calamity and grief we flourish, and through peace and joy we perish. (12.15)

      Failure is key to self-improvement: maybe that is a notion of Confucian innovation that was transmitted to Mr. Kao.

Doing Well v. Doing Good

An article in the NYT today looks into the question of the purpose of higher education.  Is it simply a matter of producing individuals who will go out into the business world and amass large personal fortunes, or should there be more encouragement of giving something back to society?   This quote seemed to summarize the issue:

As Adam M. Guren, a new Harvard graduate who will be pursuing his doctorate in economics, put it, “A lot of students have been asking the question: ‘We came to Harvard as freshmen to change the world, and we’re leaving to become investment bankers — why is this?’ ”

     Of course the first answer to his question is rather obvious: it's all about the money.  People want to get rich, they pursue careers that they believe will bring them lots of material wealth and stuff.  Our cultural revolves around the pursuit of wealth, which we so often mistake for the pursuit of happiness.  Not much surprising there.

        By chance, this story comes just as the president of my college, and a rather large entourage of administrative and development staff, are making a visit to China and Hong Kong and Taiwan.  One of the members of the trip stopped by my office the other day, wondering how Confucianism related to Chinese educational systems, especially the idea of a liberal arts college (which is what my school is).   I was, naturally, overjoyed by the question because so much of what I understand about Confucian education (and by that term I mean the ideas that come from the Analects and Mencius, not necessarily the institutional practices that emerged later and dominated elite-level Chinese society) is so very similar to the ideals of liberal arts education.  

       Let me mention two points in this regard.

      First, both classical Confucian education and modern American liberal arts pedagogy value exposure to a wide breadth of learning.  In Confucius's own time, he emphasized the "six arts" - ritual, music, archery, chariot-riding, calligraphy, and computation.   He expected the well educated individual to be familiar with all these areas but to be specialist in none.  Something like the old British notion of the well-rounded amateur.  Indeed, in googling around, I found an old article by one Rupert Wilkinson in the journal Sociology of Education (Vol. 37, No. 1, Autumn, 1963, pp. 9-26), entitled: "The Gentleman Ideal and the Maintenance of a Political Elite: Two Case Studies: Confucian Education in the Tang, Sung, Ming and Ching Dynasties; and the Late Victorian Public Schools (1870-1914)."   Here's the link, for those who can access JSTOR.  American liberal arts education is derived from the British ideal, and thus open to the same sorts of comparisons with ancient China.   Wilkinson notes that the ideal of the amateur animated education in both Imperial China and Victorian England. 

      The author also makes the important political point that higher education in both times and places - and I would add in contemporary American elite colleges as well - was (and is) all about producing and grooming a ruling class.  What I want to emphasize, for the moment, however, is the educational means to that end: exposure to a broad curriculum of various facets.  Confucius captures the notion of the well-rounded amateur well in Analects 9.2:

A villager in Ta Hsiang said: “Great indeed is Confucius!  His erudition is truly vast – and still, he’s lived without fame and renown.”   When the Master heard this, he said to his disciples: “What shall I be – a charioteer or an archer?  I’ll be a charioteer!”    

     Confucius is making a joke here.  He is laughing at the idea that an educated man should be so specialized in one area that he would assume a discrete title.  It matters none at all to him what his title should be; indeed, it is absurd to pick only one, so he just randomly assigns himself to be a charioteer.  His point, however, is precisely the opposite.  A man of truly vast erudition cannot be characterized by a single discipline.  

     And that is what is "liberal" about a liberal arts education.  It is all about exposure to a wide array of ideas and arguments and images.  It resists specialization and an overly narrow focus.  Its purpose is to broaden one's mind, to familiarize the student with many different facets of human experience and natural phenomenon.  A liberal arts education is not a business school; it is the living expression of the full range of human knowledge.

      There is a second point of comparison, however.  One that speaks more directly to the question of purpose. 

       It was very much the intention of Confucius that education should produce morally better individuals.  He famously rejected the pursuit of profit and he equally famously promoted the ideal of Humanity: the daily conscientious effort to perform proper ethical acts in a way that cultivates the familial and social relationships that define any individual.   Education, in short, is all about learning how to do good.  Doing well, economically, is a distraction.  His hope was that the morally good would then rule, a hope that was regularly dashed by the harsh political realities of his own time.

     This sense of education as means of moral perfection is also a part of the American liberal arts traditions.  Granted, we do not, these days, talk about quite this way.  But I think there is still a fairly powerful, if often unspoken, assumption that liberal arts education at least has the potential to makes its students better people.   Poignantly, while looking around for sources for this point, I came upon a letter to the editor of the NYT, written by a former president of my college, Hank Payne, a man I knew and admired.  He died just this year.  Hank's letter, from 1996, had a title that Confucius would have loved: "Liberal Arts, by Definition, Teach Morality," Here are some his words, which resonate with Confucian sensibilities:

One cannot underestimate the deep moral importance of the intellectual and character virtues instilled when we do our centuries-old job right. Strengthening intellectual virtues -- such as the willingness to explore widely, the ability to test one's ideas against those of others, the capacity to listen thoughtfully, the strength to adduce reasons for assertions -- has a clear relationship to strengthening character virtues like honesty, humility, integrity and independence.     

    Ultimately, it is about doing good, not doing well.

Learning Humanity from Same Sex Couples

A story a couple of day's ago in the NYT reports:

For insights into healthy marriages, social scientists are looking in an unexpected place.

A growing body of evidence shows that same-sex couples have a great deal to teach everyone else about marriage and relationships. Most studies show surprisingly few differences between committed gay couples and committed straight couples, but the differences that do emerge have shed light on the kinds of conflicts that can endanger heterosexual relationships.

    It seems that gender inequalities in heterosexual marriages can feed into unspoken resentments that attenuate and weak relationships.  And then, when arguments happen, those differences can worsen based on how men and women handle uncomfortable verbal confrontations:

“When they got into these really negative interactions, gay and lesbian couples were able to do things like use humor and affection that enabled them to step back from the ledge and continue to talk about the problem instead of just exploding,” said Robert W. Levenson, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

The findings suggest that heterosexual couples need to work harder to seek perspective. The ability to see the other person’s point of view appears to be more automatic in same-sex couples, but research shows that heterosexuals who can relate to their partner’s concerns and who are skilled at defusing arguments also have stronger relationships.

    That ability to see another person's point of view sounds like the approach to Humanity that Confucius urges on us:

...As for Humanity: if you want to make a stand, help others make a stand, and if you want to reach your goal, help others reach their goal.  Consider yourself and treat others accordingly: this is the method of Humanity. (6.29)

     In other words, we can only find ourselves through our relationships with others.   So, if we really want to develop ourselves to our fullest capacities, we must do so in concert with others; and that entails understanding not only ourselves in relation to others but also others in relation to us.

Confucianism as a State Ideology? I Don't Think So....

     A good post over at The China Beat by Xujun Eberlein on contemporary Chinese Confucian thinker Jiang Qing (yes, the name has the same English transliteration as Mao's infamous wife).   Here are a couple of Eberlein's grafs:

In his books and articles on Political Confucianism, Jiang Qing calls for a restoration of Confucianism as the state ideology, as it had been in many dynasties. Further, he outlines a Confucian political structure strongly distinct from both Soviet-style communism and Western-style democracy.

Democracy is Westernized and imperfect in nature, Jiang Qing points out. If applied to China, a western style democratic system would have only one legitimacy – popular will, or civil legitimacy. Such uni-legitimacy operates on the quantity of votes, regardless of the moral implications of decisions taken. Since human desire is selfish by nature, those decisions can be self serving for a particular majority's interest. Because of this, Jiang Qing argues, civil legitimacy alone is not sufficient to build or keep a constructive social order.

       Two things come to mind here, by way of critique.  First, while it is true that certain institutions and practices of modern democratic politics can be said to have arisen and developed in something called "the West," it is not true that democracy is simply a "Western" thing.  "West" is as problematic a construction as "East" or "Orient."  It operates on too abstract a level of historical analysis to be very useful in analyzing and understanding political dynamics.  And it is as politicized as any other such generalization.  It is used by critics of democracy to link popular demands for more open and participatory politics with imperialism.  It thus frames Chinese or Vietnamese or North Korean democrats as unpatriotic (I do not mean to suggest that his is Jiang Qing's intention; but the broader discourse of "The West" creates this effect).   A further ramification of the use of "The West" is to distract attention away from historical and contemporary democratic practices in Asia (are Taiwanese not "Chinese"?  Are Koreans not "Easterners"?  Are Indians not "Asian"?) and also glosses over the history and current manifestations of anti-democracy in the "West."  Overall, a high cost to pay intellectually for a fatuous over-generalization. 

      But there is a second, and I think more important, point to be made here.  Jiang is calling for the establishment of Confucianism as a "state ideology."  This strikes me as impossible under contemporary conditions of a reformed and globalized China.  

     Today, China is increasingly multicultural.  By this I mean that the cultural expressions of Chinese-ness have multiplied rapidly.  Not that long ago, when I started studying China, it would have been absurd to use the term "Chinese rock and roll."  That musical form was obviously "Western" with no historical roots in China, something utterly alien to a Chinese sensibility.  Now, whatever one thinks of it aesthetically, Chinese rock is commonplace.  Chinese people play rock and roll, they express the genre in distinctly Chinese ways, and they add to the global repertoire of rock and roll more generally.  It is, at this point, absurd to assert that this is not a facet of contemporary Chinese experience.  We could make the same point about many, many kinds of cultural practices, from sports to theater to literature to visual art.

     The political implications of this Chinese multiculturalism include the impossibility of containing modern Chinese-ness within any single ideology.  Confucianism cannot serve as the singular state ideology because no system of thought or philosophy can so serve.  Confucianism can provide us with a unique perspective on modern issues but it cannot capture the totality of modernity.  Neither can socialism or liberalism (which is not, by the way, the "state ideology" of the US) or conservatism or whatever have you.  Globalization, which brings constant movement of ideas and cultural practices, makes this even more impossible.  

    Jiang's lament is familiar to many intellectuals faced with the instabilities caused by globalized cultural flows.  But instead of searching for an idealized stasis, which can never be established, it might be better to just open ourselves to constant cultural change.  Conservatives in the US must learn this same lesson.  We're all in the same global cultural boat, why not just go along for the ride....

Wen Jiabao is better than Mao Zedong

      I have just finished grading final exams for my Chinese politics class.  One question asked students to compare and contrast Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.  Most answers emphasized the differences but some telling similarities were noted.  So, events like the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution are in my mind today, and they lurk in the background as I read the news of the aftermath of the terrible Sichuan earthquake.  That is what has led to today's blog idea: Wen Jiabao is better than Mao Zedong.

     I will not go overboard with the praise for Wen's handling of the earthquake tragedy.  He has certainly done a good job in rallying people to respond to the crisis and he has shown a genuinely caring attitude and heart.  I will wait, however, before I become one of his supporters on Facebook.  Let's see how he, and the Party, deal with the longer-term issues of why school buildings performed so badly, and whether the relative openness of the media coverage continues (it seems not), and how re-building proceeds in coming months and years.  I will give Wen this much, however (much to the delight of my Chinese nationalist friends) he has proven to be a more effective leader in a crisis situation than George W. Bush - but, then again, that's not saying much...

     The larger, and to me more interesting, comparison is that between Wen and Mao.   What would Mao have done under the circumstances of the Sichuan earthquake?  It is, of course, impossible to know.  But let's consider how he actually responded when confronted with the emerging disaster of the Great Leap Forward in 1959.  Instead of accepting that his ideology had created famine and starvation, he resisted reality and fought back politically, sacking the man who dared stand up to him, Defense Minister Peng Dehuai.  The lives of millions of people mattered less to him than his own ideological "correctness" and his own political position.  It took two more horrible years after the Lushan Plenum in 1959 before the country could begin to drag itself up from the man-made horror of the Great Leap.  Some leaders, most notably Deng, recognized what had happened and they embraced a more pragmatic orientation to avoid such calamities in the future.  But not Mao.  He attacked again, in 1966, against the pragmatists, fomenting the Cultural Revolution and casting the country into ten years of political chaos. 

     One conclusion to draw from this sorry history is that Mao did not "serve the people," as the famous slogan has it.  He served himself and his ideology, much to the people's harm.

     Wen is not like this.  His presence in the quake zone has communicated his commitment to responding to the immediate needs of the people there.  Yes, it is a propaganda coup for the central government, but that does not mean that Wen is not genuinely involved and moved by the disaster.  He obviously is.  The pictures of him next to the destroyed school, crouching down and peering into a pit where child victims lay, are truly heart-rending.  I'm sure his heart was rent.   And his being there put pressure on local officials to attend to the rescue and recovery work.   He has done a good job.

      Wen's truer enactment of "serve the people" makes sense in the context of post-Mao China (or should we, at this point, be saying post-post-Mao China?).  The regime's legitimacy has shifted away from ideologyl to performance, away from Marxist rationalizations to the delivery of a better standard of living.  Indeed, I would call it "Mencian legitimacy," after the sensibility of Mencius, who continually demanded of rulers that they attend to the needs of the people.  Ironically, "serve the people," captures the Mencian spirit. 

     Wen, in particular, has presented himself as a man of the people, a leader who cares for the poor and powerless.  It was he who went to a train station in January, during the snow crisis, to publicly apologize.  He plays the role of a modern Mencian well.

   Mencian legitimacy is not necessarily a democratic legitimacy.  As in the PRC now, it may not require electoral competition for executive and legislative power.   An "enlightened" authoritarianism, which was the standard in Mencius' own time, may be able to respond to popular needs, as now seems to be the case in Sichuan.  Indeed, a focused and centralized political authority may be able to act more quickly and effectively, at least for a time, than a slower and sloppier democratic system.  It seems certain that, thus far, the response of Wen and the central government has bolstered regime legitimacy in the eyes of many, many Chinese citizens.  The leadership is seen to be doing the right thing, and doing it with real care and conviction.   Mencian legitimacy can strengthen authoritarianism.

     But Mencian legitimacy can also work against authoritarianism (just as it can work against democratically-elected leaders who fail the test of serving the people, as is arguably now the case with Bush).  What happens if the grief of the people turns into anger against officials?  Might the people then demand that they should have a greater role in determining who their leaders should be?  If, as Mencius says, "Heaven sees through the eyes of the people, and Heaven hears through the ears of the people," then what should happen if the people claim a greater role in the selection of political leaders?  Heaven could come between the Party and the people.  I wonder what Wen would do then?

Still Here

     Sorry for the relative blog silence of late.  Between grading (which I am still finishing), preparing for a summer program that I am directing, and doing some family stuff for the Memorial Day weekend (traveled to Staten Island, NY for a gathering of in-laws), I have been getting behind in posting.  Maybe it is the three year lull - I will be celebrating a three-year blog-versary later this summer.  In any event, I'm back and will apply myself with increased vigor.

     Here is something I noticed the other day, a review of a book written by a friend, Danlel A. Bell's China's New Confucianism.  I haven't seen the book yet, but have read some of the previously published essays it is based upon.  Here is an excerpt from the review:

At the core of Bell's book is his speculation on the long-term effects of the Confucian revival. China under Mao assumed a Legalist policy (strong state sovereignty, harsh laws) that helped restore its global footing. One reason Mao's brand of Marxism worked was that it incorporated elements of Confucian self-criticism, emphasizing that "demands should be directed at oneself before being directed at others." But as the gulf between rich and poor widens and social-justice issues such as the chaos in Tibet threaten the Communist Party framework, "new left" intellectuals envision the eventual replacement of Marxist ideology with something like a Confucian socialist republic. China's drive toward economic growth may be fueling political control, Bell notes, but "hardly anybody really believes that Marxism should provide guidelines for thinking about China's political future." What next? "It is not entirely fanciful to surmise that the Chinese Communist Party will be relabeled the Chinese Confucian Party in the next couple of decades."

     I would just add a couple of points.   First, I'm glad to see him peg Mao as a Legalist.  It may seem obvious to those who follow Chinese history, but it is a point that needs to be made.  I would not want the current Confucian revival in China to produce a "Mao as Confucian Gentleman" narrative.  Second, while it is true that Marxist ideology has clearly declined, it is still a bit difficult to imagine that the Communist Party would, in the near future (let's say 10-20 years) explicitly embrace a Confucian political identity.  Some sort of nationalism is the more likely ideological turn - it is easily within reach of the regime, it is a common move for governments all around the world, and it would not require the kind of explicit philosophical revision that an invocation of Confucianism would necessitate.  Think of all those Chinese women who would ask if a "Chinese Confucian Party" was going to return to the historical subordination of women? 

     In any event, I am going to order Daniel's book today.

Angry Black Mencius

      A controversy of sorts has emerged over the planned Washington DC statue of Martin Luther King.  Apparently, some organization called the US Commission on Fine Arts, which has a role in the proceedings, feels that the model of the monument is too "confrontational."  Eugene Robinson has an op-ed in today's Washington Post that sums things up nicely:

At issue is the statue that will stand as King's official monument in Washington. The arts commission, which rules on the aesthetics of such memorials, has sent a letter to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation complaining that the depiction is "a stiffly frontal image, static in pose, confrontational in character."

What they thought they were getting, commissioners wrote, was a "dynamic" and "meditative" King. Leave aside for the moment the question of how any sculptor is supposed to make someone look dynamic and meditative at the same time. The point is that the arts commission, for some reason, was not comfortable with the image of a stern-faced, 28-foot-tall black man who has his arms crossed.

 I am totally with Robinson on this:

Here's what is really going on: It's clear that some people would prefer to remember King as some sort of paragon of forbearance who, through suffering and martyrdom, shamed the nation into doing the right thing. In truth, King was supremely impatient. He was a man of action who used pressure, not shame, to change the nation. The Montgomery bus boycott, to cite just one example, was less an act of passive resistance than a campaign of economic warfare. Yes, he knew that televised images of black people walking miles to work would help mold opinion around the world. But he also knew that depriving the bus companies of needed revenue would hit the Jim Crow system where it really hurt.

     King was confrontational.  He had to be.  He was struggling against powerful political and historical forces.  In defiance he spoke truth to power, he demanded that right be done.  So why not remember him in all the glory of that struggle and defiance?

       In a way, King reminds me of Mencius, who also bravely spoke truth to power.  While perhaps Mencius would not have pursued the same political tactics as King, he would have recognized the moral purpose of the civil rights struggle.  Mencius, like King was quite willing to confront power holders with their shortcomings, as in this passage (Lau translation):

Mencius went to P'ing Lu.  "Would you or would you not," said he to the governor, "dismiss a lancer who has failed three times in one day to report for duty?"

"I would not wait for the third time."

"But you yourself have failed to report for duty many times.  In years of famine, close on a thousand of your people  suffered, the old and the young being abandoned  in the gutter, the able-bodied scattered in all directions."

"It was not within my power to do anything about this."

"Supposing a man were entrusted with the care of cattle and sheep.  Surely he ought to seek  pasturage and fodder for the animals.  If he found that this cold not be done, should he return his charge to the owner or should he stand by and watch the animals die?"

"In this I am at fault."... (IIB.4)

     Mencius gets right up in the face of the governor.  When the latter tries to shirk his responsibilities, Mencius comes at him again from another discursive angle.  He was determined to make the political powers-that-be do the right thing, and he did, in this case at least.   There is a certain defiance and confrontation in Mencius however much it might have been expressed in distinct cultural practices of another time and place.  And that is rather like Martin Luther King.

       Yes to the "confrontational" King statue!

Taoists in Texas Moving to Vermont

    A story in today's NYT reports on a family in Texas that has embraced the "voluntary simplicity" movement: the are giving away most of their possessions, to free themselves from the burdens of material things, and moving to a mountain cabin in Vermont (just up the road from me!):

Like many other young couples, Aimee and Jeff Harris spent the first years of their marriage eagerly accumulating stuff: cars, furniture, clothes, appliances and, after a son and a daughter came along, toys, toys, toys.

Now they are trying to get rid of it all, down to their fancy wedding bands. Chasing a utopian vision of a self-sustaining life on the land as partisans of a movement some call voluntary simplicity, they are donating virtually all their possessions to charity and hitting the road at the end of May.

       A variety of American sources are mentioned as an inspiration for this move:

Though it may not be the stuff of the typical American dream, the voluntary simplicity movement, which traces its inception to 1980s Seattle, is drawing a great deal of renewed interest, some experts say.

“If you think about some of the shifts we’re having economically — shifts in oil and energy — it may be the right time,” said Mary E. Grigsby, associate professor of rural sociology at the University of Missouri and the author of “Buying Time and Getting By: The Voluntary Simplicity Movement.”

“The idea in the movement was ‘everything you own owns you,’ ” said Dr. Grigsby, who sees roots of the philosophy in the lives of the Puritans. “You have to care for it, store it. It becomes an appendage, I think. If it enhances your life and helps you do the things you want to do, great. If you are burdened by these things and they become the center of what you have to do to live, is that really positive?”

Juliet B. Schor, a sociology professor at Boston College and author of “The Overspent American,” said the modern “downshifters,” as she called them, owed debts to the hippies and the travel romance of Jack Kerouac.

     Seattle, Puritans, Hippies, Kerouac.  Come on, this is a Taoist impulse.  These people are heeding Chuang Tzu, even if they have not read him.  They are "getting free" and no longer allowing themselves to get tangled in things.   They are following the spirit of passage 12 of the Tao Te Ching:

The five colors blind eyes.
The five tone deafen ears.
The five tastes blur tongues.
Fast horses and breathtaking hunts make minds wild and crazy.
Things rare and expensive make people lose their way.

 The Harris family have a blog, Cage Free Family.  So, we can watch their progress as they go.  Someone should give them a copy of the Tao Te Ching.

Confucian Civil Unions, Perhaps?

   I've been thinking more about the California gay marriage decision and Confucianism.  Thanks to the comments from my last, brief post, I have a new idea: a modern Confucian would be more likely to accept civil unions for gay couples than marriage.  This is a tentative conclusion, the reasoning for which I spell out below, and I welcome all comments and criticisms.

     Justsomeguy and the Western Confucian raise some good points.  Let me take Western Confucian's first. 

       He argues, from Analects 7.1, that Confucius understood himself to be a defender of tradition, not an innovator.  Confining marriage to heterosexual couples is generally recognized as the traditional practice; so, Confucius would likely be against the innovation of gay marriage.  I generally disagree with this argument. 

     First, while Confucius does present himself as against innovation in 7.1, various commentators (Hall and Ames; Leys) have argued that, in fact, Confucius was very creative in his thinking.  The idea that hereditary status was not a sufficient claim for legitimate rule was quite radical in its time.  To the extent to which Confucius and Mencius looked toward a moral meritocracy (i.e. the morally good should rule), they pushed against the political status quo.  This is especially evident in Mencius.   Indeed, Mencius is so problematic to established powers-that-be, it is said (pdf file!) Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming Dynasty, decreed that this line from Mencius be deleted:

The people are the most elevated, next comes the state, the sovereign comes last.

    We could also invoke Analects 9.3, in which Confucius creatively adapts specific elements of Ritual to suit his immediate purposes, to suggest that Confucians do not simply defend tradition for tradition's sake.  Tradition is important, to be sure, but it must be enacted in relation to the contemporary ethical context.  If Humanity is best served by revising tradition, then tradition must be revised.

      Yet even if we accept (and I suspect not everyone will) that Confucius was, in fact, more of an innovator than he lets on, I think Western Confucian's point should give us some pause.   Modern Confucians would be careful in how and when and how far they revise tradition.  They might be more comfortable with incremental steps: choosing a silk cap instead of a linen cap (Analects 9.3), not throwing out the cap altogether.   And gay marriage is a rather significant socio-cultural change.  It's big.  And that might mean Confucians, in seeking some sort of balance between contemporary Humanity and established tradition, might gravitate toward civil unions, at least for a time, instead of marriage.

      One of the students in my tutorial this semester also raised in interesting point when I broached the possibility of Confucian gay marriage: does it violate the rectification of names (Analects 13.3)?  The idea here is that "marriage" generally is taken to connote heterosexual unions.  To move to gay marriage delinks the practice from the name.   I don't see this as an insurmountable problem, insofar as I understand the rectification of names to demand that we live up to certain standards of Humanity (i.e. if a "father" is not living up to the duties of a "father," then he should not be allowed to use the name "father").  If the moral purpose of marriage is a life-long commitment to a particular loving relationship, and the family building possibilities that it brings, then it would seem that the practice of gay couples committing themselves to one and other and raising children in a supportive and loving environment meets the Humane (ren) standards of "marriage".

     The issue, however, might be a matter of time and timing.  It takes time for society to come to understand that gay marriage is as much marriage as any other sort of marriage.  This would not absolutely disallow gay marriage, but it might militate for some transitional period during which gay couples could enter into civil unions (with all the legal recognitions and rights of "marriage") that would establish a broader social understanding of the good of gay marriage. 

     I could see how gay people would chafe at this, arguing, as the California Supreme Court does, that there is no compelling state interest in denying them all of the benefits, cultural as well as legal, of marriage.  But  the problem here is to derive a Confucian position on the issue, not one that simply puts a Confucian facade on a California perspective (full disclosure: I am perfectly comfortable with extending the practice of marriage to gay people - but this post is not about my personal position, but what the most plausible modern Confucian position might be).

      Bottom line: Confucians would lean toward civil unions at this point, but would be open to gay marriage in the future, perhaps after more states have taken similar moves.

       Justsomeguy also raises an important point when he raises the yin/yang thing:

Yin/Yang cosmology. While the Analects are fairly silent on this issue, Confucius's appreciation for the Yijing can be taken as an endorsement of that formulation. While they are both ultimately divisible into further aspects of yin and yang (a possible work around), I'm not sure how he'd view double yin or double yang relationships given the way this system is devised. They would be unbalanced.

     Again, I do not think this is a fatal objection.  We are not talking about a very large sector of the population, after all. What percentage of the US population identifies as gay or lesbian?  And what percentage of those people seeks a married relationship?  And what percentage of all marriages (say, in Massachusetts where it is allowed) are gay marriages?  I don't have these numbers (but would love it if someone sent them in!) but I suspect in all cases they are quite small, well below 10% in all cases.   Allowing gay marriage, then, whatever yin/yang "imbalance" it might bring, would not have a significant effect on the yin/yang balance of society at large.  Indeed, the overwhelming experience in Massachusetts, where I live, is that ultimately gay marriage is not that big a deal.  It hardly effects the daily life, for good or ill, of the vast majority of people.   Once the practice is established, it's not that big a deal (it's getting it established that is big).

      But the yin/yang point might be important in another way.  It suggests that gay marriage is different from heterosexual marriage: the former is double yin or double yang, and the latter is yin/yang.  Again that difference may not be enough to reject it on Confucian grounds, but it is a difference that might have to be recognized in some manner.

     I should add here that a modern Confucian argument would not seek universal rights claims that apply to all individuals, as the California Supreme Court does.  "Rights" is not a Confucian concept, even though a certain ethical universalism might apply.  It is proper, from a Confucian perspective, to treat different things differently.  A father should shield his son from the law when he steals a sheep, but should presumably turn in a stranger who steals a sheep, because a son is not a stranger, the two are different. 

     Thus, treating gay unions in a manner distinct from heterosexual unions would be permissible for a Confucian.  And, given the various points made above, might be preferable, at least for a time.  That different treatment, however, is bounded by the general standard of Humanity (so, certain tangible benefits should not be withheld if so doing makes it harder to maintain strong and loving relationships).

     And so, I am drawn to the conclusion that a modern Confucian in California would, today, be more likely to advocate for civil unions for gays and lesbians and less likely to back gay marriage.

California Gay Marriage: Confucius Agrees

     The news today, somewhat unsurprisingly, is that the California Supreme Court has overturned a state ban on gay marriage.  What would Confucius say?

     I wrote about gay marriage and Confucianism once before, and I think the argument still holds (though it needs to be fleshed out a bit more, as I am doing in chapter 5 of my book):

...I think a modern Confucian perspective could accept a gay relationship if it was committed and constructive of lasting family bonds.  The type of sex hardly matters.  What is important is that people perform humanity-creating social responsibilities.  Genetics are less significant than caring social practices; so, adoption is fine - just as it was in ancient China.  It would seem, then, that gay marriage and child-rearing could be consonant with a Confucian-inspired ethics  (although an over-wrought homosexual identity would be frowned upon).

 I just wanted to put this out there and ask my Confucian-minded readers what they think.  Would a modern Confucian accept gay marriage?  Why or why not?